The Press Box - New News About Nuzzi, and Mamdani Goes to Washington. Plus: Susan Orlean on Breaking Into The New Yorker, Working for Tina Brown, and More.

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

Hello, media consumers! Bryan and David discuss Bryan’s newest Texas barbecue adventure before diving into the most recent news in the ever-evolving Olivia Nuzzi saga, including their thoughts on Ryan Lizza’s second Substack piece and whether this story has reached the point of “feeling like you know too much” (09:49). Next, the guys dive into everything that came out of the meeting between Zohran Mamdani and President Trump in the Oval Office (24:11). Lastly, the show ends with today’s Notebook Dump, where journalist and author Susan Orlean joins the show to discuss her start at The New Yorker, working for Tina Brown, and much more (36:03). Plus, an Only in Journalism first, and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline! Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Susan Orlean Producer: Bruce Baldwin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David? Yes. Happy Thanksgiving week. Happy Thanksgiving week to you too. I'm coming to you from Texas, and in an all-time upset, I have some barbecue notes for you. Oh, my gosh. All right. What are they?

Well, we went to Goldies in Fort Worth yesterday morning. This is the place that in the previous Texas monthly state power rankings finished number one overall in the state. Oh, yeah. And I know Goldies. Christine, I got in the line at 9.45 a.m. She'd like leave the kids at the fire station or something. We did. Found a fine looking Fort Worth fireman who seemed trustworthy who could take care of our children while we stood in line for Brisket.

Love the barbecue line just as an institution. Mm-hmm. It was 55 degrees. You have to have a barbecue line. Like most places, most other big. business enterprises have figured this out, right? You just hire more staff, you do whatever. But like in barbecue, in the world of barbecue, if you don't have a line, you don't have much.

Well, and Goldies is open three days a week. It's almost, you know, you and I didn't take a lot of economics classes. But hey, there's a certain scarcity to it. Only open three days a week, it's really good. You're going to have a line all three of those days. Yeah. In this case, it was 55 degrees in sunny. We brought the lawn chairs, brought a copy of the financial.

Times weekend edition. You can see too many other people with that out there. Yeah. I don't know where you stand on this, but I have no problem with people drinking Shinerbach or other beer at 9.45 a.m. as they wait for barbecue. No, not if you're in a barbecue line, sure. It's like tailgating. But see, I take the same approach I took to football games when I was at UT, which is, I don't have a problem with you drinking, but I don't want to because I want to have all my

faculties ready for kickoff. Yeah, absolutely. I don't want to be like, man, that was the best barbecue I ever ate. I was drunk as hell and don't remember it. No, no. Yeah. I want to enjoy the barbecue and then we can drink. Yeah, sure.

I mean, that's the thing. When you're drinking at 945 in the morning, it hits pretty hard. The buzz hits pretty hard. You just don't, you won't remember that much at all. For the uninitiated Goldies in Fort Worth is out in this unincorporated part of the city. So you're standing out. outside basically in front of a barbecue shack. And there's just delicious smoke smell the whole time you're in line.

And this is the other thing about barbecue. I mean, impulse buys when you're in the barbecue line. You're standing there for hours, dude. I mean, think how delicious that pack of juicy fruit looks when you finally get up to the register at Target. Oh, yeah. The barbecue line, I mean, we're talking, you know, get up there and they're like, hey, you know, we had some pork steak smoking all night.

you want one of those. Oh, yeah, we'll throw that in to my order. Pork steak? I had a pork steak yesterday. What is a pork steak? I don't know. I didn't get it, but it sounded amazing. Chipotle Saundage. You want to toss one or two of the?

Why not? Yeah, of course. In addition to the normal Texas gear of hoodies and work boots and camo, I found two amazing t-shirts in the barbecue line yesterday that I need to tell you about. Mm-hmm. A woman who was up near the front, meaning she must have gotten there before 8 a.m. This, by the way, the place opens at 11. So she must have been in line at 8 a.m.

She had a blue t-shirt on it that said this, David, America, colon, Texas, and 49 bitches. Oh, my Lord. She was also holding a Reagan Bush 84 coozy, which she told me was, in fact, a vintage item, not a, not a reproduction. that was one awesome t-shirt. The second belonged to the guy who was sitting right in front of me in the line. He had kind of a Brett Favre look with the beard

and the close-cropped gray hair. And the misappropriation of government funds thing going on. No, David, don't you dare say that about this nice gentleman of the barbecue line. And I was a little hesitant to go up to him because I saw the shirt as soon as we walked in.

Actually, Christine tip me off to it. And I was like, oh, my God, I want to take a picture. I want to take a picture. I was a little hesitant, and I was like, you know what, it's Texas. Everybody's really nice. And it turns out that he was incredibly nice about taking a photo. But I need you to look. First of all, anybody listening to this, just pause the podcast and go over to either my Twitter account or blue sky accounts.

You can actually see this shirt to appreciate it. David, you can see it in the Google Doc. This is a great t-shirt that has a picture of a frog on it, just kind of an inconspicuous picture of a frog. And the words above the frog are, sometimes I, just be farting. Sometimes I just be farting. That's pretty incredible. I was like, I would love to buy that shirt and buy another copy for David so that we can

wear it together on this podcast. We finally got to the front of the Goldies line around 1230, 1245, so it was a full three hours. And what time do they start serving? So we got in line at 930, 945. They start serving at 11. It goes slow because they, They got to cut it in front of you. So even after that, there was another hour and a half in line.

I think we were just right at three hours when we started to eat. But when you get up to the front, it's just like Cats is deli in the Lower East Side where they put a little taste. Oh, yeah. For you, in this case, it's a burn in that just melt in your mouth as an overused term. This just dissolves in your mouth. I mean, just dissolves. Mm-hmm. So we're sitting there and Christina, like, God, what are we going to get?

Are we going to over order? I know we're going to over order. And I swear to God, I thought of you at this moment. This is not podcast performance here. This is a true story. When you and I used to live together, we did not talk to each other like members of the Manosphere on a daily basis. No.

But on weekends, we would go out to brunch. We'd be looking at the menu and I'd be like, I don't know, David, right here, there's a sausage and gravy with two fried eggs on it, or there's a. you know, delicious kale frittata. Yeah. And you would invariably say to me, are you going to be a baby or are you going to be a man? I said, I don't want to be a baby.

I'm going to order that sausage gravy and biscuits and eggs, David. I don't know. Absolutely no recollection of that, but I totally could have said. So we ordered a pound and a half a brisket, eight pork, cribs, and a slice of turkey just for garnish. Nice. It was unbelievable. And I sort of gave up this year on having a true barbecue Thanksgiving.

You know, in previous years, I'd always been like, hey, you know, I love the Thanksgiving sides. Yeah. Thanksgiving sides are delicious. By the way, send both of David and I to the old podcast or some, if we ever start ranking Thanksgiving sides or ranking Halloween candy on the podcast, I think, folks, it's done. Congratulations. We're all good. But I love the Thanksgiving sides. And I just wanted to eliminate the mediocre turkey and replace it with delicious barbecue meat.

We have a few traditionalists over here at the Curtis household. So we finally reached a kind of truce, a detente, if you will, this year, where we're going to have the huge barbecue meal on Wednesday. Okay. Go to a place that Danes, which I've talked about in the podcast before, have the big meal, all the side, the barbecue sides, going to be delicious, and then a separate Thanksgiving meal before Cowboys Chiefs on Thursday. That's a traditional Thanksgiving.

Well, that's the new tradition. Yeah, it doesn't really seem like it solves a problem to me. Now you're just going to be spending Thanksgiving try, like just wistfully remembering that yesterday's meal. Well, and it's going to make the turkey even worse. That's exactly right. But that's my problem and everybody else will be happy. Or maybe everybody else will see your point because they'll just be remembering the great barbecue. And let's say, you know, next year, let's just do it all on Thursday.

What if we have a few leftovers from Wednesday? Maybe I can slip that. I don't see why you can't have a turkey and just like, you know, a bowl of pulled pork there too. This is what I've been trying. Say, I bring it home. and then there's already a turkey in the oven, and I'm bringing home a, you know, you know, a little barbecue, and that's fine.

So, yeah. Anyway. All right. Well, best of luck for next year. I mean, this year, congratulations, but let's keep pushing. Yeah. You have to take care of mom in situations like this because, you know, in previous years,

my mom would have to make beautiful Thanksgiving dinner and then wrapping it and foil and we'd eat in the parking lot of the Cowboys game. That was just demeaning for everybody. Yeah. We really need to straighten things out. All right, coming up on today's podcast, David, extra extra, get your daily nutsi. David and I attempt to process the latest revelations and latest poetry from America's

greatest media ethic story. Plus, Mom Dani goes to Washington while Marjorie Taylor Green is leaving Washington. We have some only in podcast journalism and the great Susan Orlean. Join me to talk about how she broke in at The New Yorker, how she defeats Riders Block, and how she was an extra in The Deer Hunter. All that much more on the press box. A part of the rigger, podcast, that work. Hello, media consumers, and happy Thanksgiving.

Got Brian Curtis, you got David Shoeemaker, you got producer Bruce Baldwin. David, let us begin with the latest on the Olivia Nutsi, Ryan Liza, RFK Jr. Mark Sanford Love Rambas. We learned from the New York Times on Friday, from Genia Belafonte that there was a kind of mini update or an interesting non-update

from Vanity Fair where Nutsi now works covering Pacific culture or whatever that press release said. Belafonte asked if she would continue in her new role at Vanity Fair in the wake of Liz's claims and a spokeswoman said

we were taken by surprise and we are looking at all the facts. that's from Vanity Fair. I mean, it's sort of breathtaking, shocking, galling as some of these stuff that's come out in the past couple of weeks has been,

I feel like it's even more shocking for Vanity Fair to sort of feel like they were caught Vanity Fair feels like they were caught flat-footed by any of this. That's on them. I mean, you knew exactly who you were hiring. Absolutely. I mean, the new editor, Mark Weducci, who's an Anna Wintour highlight, or what is the,

and he's a highlight, I guess, he's also an accolite. He hires her, knowing this has happened. After a night of the whatever, the hotel bar or whatever, L.A., just drinking and part, you know, and going on about the future of journalism, yeah. He gets a pop out of hiring her because this has happened. Yeah. Then he gets a second pop from publishing an excerpt from her new book that is specifically about this subject. Yeah.

But now, when you see something in the, in Telos, Ryan Liz's substacular, oh, wait a second. Are we sure we made the right decision here? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess you could, in a lot of similar news cycles, and it's hard to really think of what to compare this to. I guess you could say, yeah, the damage has already been done. It's all upside from here on out. But that's clearly not been the case here.

If we're doing secular grace for Mark Guaducci, his first appearance. the segment on the press box. Could we say that, or could we imagine that maybe when he was talking to Nutsi about the job, he said, A, I need to know everything that happened. And B, I need to know if there's anything else out there. Right. That has not come to light yet. Uh-huh.

That would, you know, put us in a compromising position if we bring you back to journalism. Might he have said something like that? Sure, sure, he might have. But it seems like a weird, you're putting everybody in a weird situation because then you're just going off the, you're proceeding with only just the faith in the person who you're asking, you're trying to, I mean, Nutsi in this case. And, I mean, if half of what you already knew is to be believed,

then you should probably assume that she's not going to be 100% forthright. You know, I mean, there's no world in which she says, yes, there's more stuff. because there's either no more stuff, which turns to be not true, or the stuff that's going to come out is very, very clearly identifies her as a person who will lie about there being stuff. You know, like it was just ridiculous. It would be ridiculous.

I mean, yes, you have to ask that, right? If you're determined to hire them, it'd be malpractice not to, but it's also sort of malpractice to hire this person to begin with, taking her word for it, right? I mean, it's also feasible that he reached out to other people, that he reached out to people at New York Magazine or whatever and said, what's the real story here? You know, what else? What do I not know?

But we don't know any of this so far. There's actually a note on that. This is from our friend Lockland Cartwright over and breaker. He says, Waducci told staff that he was as surprised as anyone with the revelations made by Liza. He also noted that as the allegations were made by Nutsi, well, the fact that they happened in New York Magazine,

Vanity Fair is not able to investigate. He rounded it out. So, yeah. So I guess like, You mean, they just don't have, like, they can't have access to the New York Mag, like, web arch, I mean, like email archives or presumably you could pick up the phone in heaven off the record conversation with somebody. But this isn't like some sort of like labor law argument, like, oh, is that a previous employer? That's a statute of limitations, right? Or you don't have the right to anybody else's emails.

It's just like another employer. You're not, you're not the police. No, I know, but just the wording of that made it sort of unclear. But yeah, I understand. He rounded it out, Cartwright writes, by making the point that at a moment when questions are swirling around credibility and journalism, taking immediate action owing to claims made by a lover scorned, did not feel like the right course of action.

Again, that's from Breaker. And then Natalie Corach, in last night's edition of the Status Newsletter, says that the print edition of the Hollywood issue, that's the next issue that has the extract from an American Kanto. Coratch writes includes an abstract nude portrait of nudity by sketch artist

Isabel Browman status is learned from multiple people familiar. Throwing that out there. Then on Friday night, David, we get Ryan Lizza Part 2. Yeah. A little late night telos, if you will. A telos

novella, if you will. We need to use that headline before Puck or somebody else. Elbows in on our territory. I personally kept thinking of Liza, like the Danny DeVito character in L.A. Confidential. It was running Hush Hush Magazine, just, you know, sitting in as I was like, I got another one that's going to make their jaws drop. Yeah.

It started out with some poetry that Lizza said was written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I don't know how much of this I want to read. so I will take a very chaste excerpt here I am a river you are my canyon I mean to flow through you I mean to subdue and tame you my love

now last week we looked at the Nutsi excerpt and we asked is this good writing so in fairness I think we should look at RFK's reported poetry and ask is this good poetry is this poetry I think is another question And I can't say that I'm the appropriate judge for that. No, this just seems really, really bad.

I don't even know what the joke is. The joke is what he wrote. There's nothing for me to say to make it funnier. Lizza wrote more about the Mark Sanford episode. He notes, Olivia had written a tabloid-style news story about how, quote, sources in Washington, D.C. and Charleston have been buzzing recently about an unexpected romance. Mark Sanford and Olivia Nutsi, end quote,

who was described as, quote, one of the most famous political reporters in America, a blonde beauty who gained critical acclaim as a skilled profile writer, gaining access to the powerful and the mysterious and turning into pure journalistic gold. Lizzie continues, Olivia told me she wrote the fake article

as an exercise to think through what might be the worst that could be said publicly if the affair became known, though that didn't really make sense to me, given the piece's tone. I'll also note that Lizza Nutsi got engaged after this happened. Just in case you're trying to timeline this whole telos novella.

It's also more about RF. There was the intervention of COVID at some point in the story as it's retold to us by Lizza. So yeah, I mean, I'm sure that had something to do with it too. It's like at some point you're just locked down together. It's a little bit harder to break things off so cleanly. So some more about RFK, whom Lizza says Nutsi met in 2023 when she was reporting a profile of Fran Drescher that was never published. Beguiling throwaway detail. We got to find that.

That can run on the cover story for the next issue of unpublished magazine that we put out there. Rejection Pile. Rejection Pile Monthly is sort of the black list of the, the news and publishing world, people would definitely subscribe for that one. This is presumably when Fran Dresher was part of the Hollywood Strike, 2023. Yeah, one would assume so. Anyway, Lizzie continues, I have never been able to convey her near total obsession with Bobby properly. What I can say with authority is that it seeped into every corner of her life,

affected every relationship she had, and drove every decision she made in late 2023 and all of 24, including her catch and kill operations on his behalf. There you go. The campaign strategy memo, she wrote him, and the other journalistic transgressions that have still not been disclosed. So if you really want to look at the meat here or the real points of interest here, there it is. And if you want to play Vanity Fair and say, you know, actually what could be new information to them that would be a, that would constitute a firing offense.

those three words, catch and kill, and I guess other journalistic transgressions, three more. I mean, obviously that stuff's pretty vague. The latter three, much more vague than the first three.

But, you know, I think that there's, you know, we've seen all this stuff with Jeffrey Epstein and Michael Wolfe. And we've talked about it. There's obviously a line that,

I would say, a number of journalists, I mean, many journalists cross in terms of like, the relationships with subjects. exchanging emails, giving advice, whatever. That's all super problematic.

And if you want that to be fireable, they know that's your call. But then there's some stuff that's just like, it's not up for debate. It's catching kill type stuff. If there's stuff that's worse than that, or on that same level, that's,

I mean, that's potentially just huge. I think helping people out of jams, helping figure out what you're going to tell other journalists. I mean, that's, a bright enough red line for me to cross whatever else has happened. And by the way, she did gesture at a little bit of this in the excerpt that was in Vanity Fair.

Uh-huh. So let's not say the Vanity Fair is just completely unknowledgeable about them. There were just lines in there about, you know, the bear carcass and I helped them, you know, figure out what to say about that and all that kind of stuff. Like you're like, I'm sorry. I would see that and be like, that doesn't seem right. Yeah. Okay. A couple questions for you before we go.

Have you reached the point of feeling like you know too much about this saga? No, because they just keep stringing you along and having more unanswered questions out there. The tease is really what gets you in. There's going to be more to learn. I mean, I'm definitely at a point where, like, I would be happy to go on a two-month vacation and come back to find that all the information is already out there, and I can just digest it at one time. But, yeah, you know, it is pretty intriguing.

I mean, it would be a lot different, I think, if... And they get at this, I think the most recent episode of Pablo Tori finds out, which I think unearths a living Nutsi's teenage pop single. Oh, no. Which I will just say, I believe it's called jailbate and is, you know, that episode of Pablo is definitely worth a listen on this subject. You know, this, her status is a, you know, potential, you know, is a big time author as someone profile in New York Times and maybe most significantly as a senior editor at Vanity Fair opens up this conversation in a way that it might not otherwise be open.

You know, I don't think we'd be, I'd be particularly as invested in having this information about former New York MAG employee, Nutsi, and Ryan, Lizzo, who has a substack, you know, like, it's, I feel like it's a totally different scale of, I mean, at that point I think you just kind of shrug your shoulders and be like, that's not, that's not necessary, you know, but it's still, but now it's, it matters, you know, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's consequential. By the way, I screwed up one detail. The part about the bear carcass that was actually in Jacob Bernstein's New York Times profile. Nudzi describes providing him with advice about how to manage campaign issues, including the impending news that he had he dropped a

barricas in Central Park. Pardon me for that one. Uh, second question. Uh, uh, second question. for you. Is it funny? We're asking, is this person's career toast about everyone in this saga except the highly placed Trump official, who is seemingly immune, and I use that word advisedly, to everything? No, I said this last week. Like, it doesn't, it hasn't even, like, it doesn't even affected him at all. I mean, it's like, he's not even part of the conversation. He's just like, he's an inanimate object. He's,

you know, just sitting there. He's like, Chekhov's gun in this whole thing. I'm sure that you could write a poem about that too. Yeah, it's very bizarre. It's very bizarre. I mean, listen, I don't, I don't, I try to stay away from calling for people's jobs on the show or in any platform as much as possible in all walks of life. I think Olivia Nootzi is more of a situation of like, maybe she shouldn't have been hired, you know, then, and she's apparently like a, I mean, she's not a staffer, right? She's got this big title, but she's like functionally a freelancer. Yeah, she has a contract. Yeah, contract employee. So, you know, maybe this contract,

when ever this contract ends, et cetera, et cetera. But, like, yeah, there would be a time where this would not only be a giant scandal for RFK Jr., but also for his boss. Like, this could, this would be a giant scandal for the White House, but that's not the world to be living anymore. So, you know, you got to save our pitchforks and torches for the journalism world. Less Chekhov's gun than Chekhov's River, am I right? Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Trump and Momdani in the Oval Office. Yeah. This meeting happened on Friday. If you'd listen to the press box on Thursday and heard Mamdani advisor, Zahrahim, you got a preview of that meeting. The New York Times, David, called it a remarkable display of Bono Me. Kudos to them for getting only in journalism word in there.

This was a soundbite that lit up Twitter when Mom Dani was asked if he thought Trump was a fascist. Are you affirming that you think President Trump is a fascist? I've spoken about that's okay. You can just say, yes. Okay. It's easier. It's easier than explaining it. I don't know.

Go ahead. Call me a fascist in the old wall office. Yeah. It's such a bizarre situation. But I feel like a lot of the coverage of it just sort of like, maybe it's because the only appropriate reaction to it is just, you know, looking at it with your jaw dropped.

Yeah. Yeah, it just, most of the coverage just, I think, wasn't even asking the questions that I was kind of interested. I mean, there's some very basic stuff. Like, like, okay, so they actually liked each other, right? Or Trump apparently liked mom dying.

What are the people inside Trump world think about this? Is this proof that there's functionally, you know, like guidelines about Trump's interaction with liberal cities and states that it's just a matter of how much he likes the person in charge of those places, you know, like, there's. But like, what went on in that meeting? Like, more importantly, like, was it just, did Trump just wake up on the right side of the bed or I guess for him the wrong side of the bed and or I mean just what on earth happened here it was a very strange meeting I mean if for no other reason then it's like Trump kind of came out looking good

and that's not generally his M.O. or his his team's M.O. Not just like accepting of Zoron but like also just sort of like acting affable and grandfatherly in a certain sort of way. I mean that quote that you just played was was that I mean just the sort of like Andy Griffith. actually not Andy Griffith, more like Andy Griffith as Matt Locke sort of, you know, like defawing. Yeah, the whole thing is, it was just incredibly bizarre. Whatever I'm Donnie did. Like, good for him, though. I mean, that's just some incredible 40 chess by that guy.

And, yeah, it'll be interesting to see where it goes. I mean, I think that there's more than anything else when we look back at this. I mean, who knows what's going to happen between Trump and New York in the next several years. But I do think that there's a lot that you're going to be able to glean from this. when people are writing their Trump, you know, biographies in five years or ten years or whatever, both the allowing him to call him a fascist, because why not? Like, what's the difference now? And also the thing about Elise DeFonik calling him a jihadist. A jihadist, sorry. And Trump just sort of saying, and in an authentic way that Trump has said

things before, just like, you know, you say things in a campaign. You know, and I think that there's this sort of very, like, intrinsic line for Trump that, like, nothing is off limits because nothing matters, right? Or at least it matters. Everything matters in its own context. And for Trump, there's only one or two contexts. You know, it's either just like, well, we got to win. I mean, I have to succeed or, you know, I have to be in the same room as you. And yeah, it was, I thought pretty eye-opening on that count. And what was your take? What was it, what was your reaction of the whole thing? Well, the criticism of political journalism is that sometimes it amounts to little more than theater criticism.

But what if the theater is so rich that really it, you know, demands theater criticism? You mentioned the Stefanic moment, also the, you know, posing in front of that portrait of Franklin Roosevelt, from giving the thumbs up, Mom Dani, not giving the thumbs up.

I mean, just the whole thing of it was, you know. Well, yeah, it's hard, again, I don't know what happened, but there was definitely like an apprehension on Mondami's part through that whole thing. And even his media appearances that he's done since then, where I don't know if it was just, he got, what's the phrase about the cat catching the bird or whatever, and not knowing what to do with it?

You know, it's like he actually got what he wanted. And then he, the cameras came on. He was like, oh, shit, am I supposed to act like I'm happy that I'm, that I've, because I've succeeded, because in doing, and in doing so, will I look like I'm too friendly with this person who will certainly go on to do a million more bad things in the next two weeks. or if there was something else bubbling

bubbling underneath. I mean, or if it was just, the look on his face to me felt less like that and felt more like the meeting hadn't gone well. And then Trump had been like,

you know, replaced with a body double for the photo op, you know, and suddenly Mondani's, mandani's just like, wait, like,

like, why is he saying these things? I'm so, like, uncomfortable right now. And that would happen with Tim Walls and J.D. Vance.

Like J.D. Vance was disarmingly nice in the VEEP debate. Oh, yeah. and Tim Wall didn't know what to do. Yeah. And then just got run over in the process. Yeah. Very, very strange encounter.

Also, strange Marjorie Taylor Green. You're going to have to update me where we are in the think piece trajectory here because we were on Strange New Respect for a couple of weeks. Now she's resigning. She's leaving the house in January. Yeah. It starts to make a little bit more sense now, but keep going. Well, I read Trump always wins.

You know, every time you oppose Trump, you get a big pop out of it. You get, you know, shots on the Sunday. shows and then, you know, he wins in the person who opposed him walks away or gets defeated at the ballot box. Well, this is clearly not a win for Trump. I mean, not only that he lose in the matter, at least in the Epstein files matters that sort of were at least Marjorie Taylor-Green positioned that as the crux of this dispute, I'm not sure if that's entirely true, remains to be seen if Trump will lose on the Medicare

subsidies issue that MTG is also sort of honed in on. But the entire thing, I mean, she owned the news cycle. She said that she was mistreated by Trump by someone she'd given someone, you know, she was disowned by him and, um, and, um, and, you know, use a lot of other very colorful metaphors along the way too. You know, obviously there's a bouncing act between like being, you know, and her, her district is, is Trump plus 35 or 45, just incredible Trump, you know, I mean, it's just an easy, an easy win for whoever runs there, if they're sufficiently maga.

she's sort of answerable to some of that, but I think that she's not going to run again. I think just even positioning this as a resignation as opposed to stepping down is notable. You know, I mean, I think there's a lot of, you know, she's certainly positioned herself as the, as the, well, I think there's even more like begrudging respect from a lot of quarters coming out of this.

This was not a win for Trump. That's said, it's easy to look back and say now, everything that we've seen that has garnered NTG any amount a begrudging respect over the past month has been preamble to this thing that was certainly planned. You know, to this, it certainly,

I don't mean staged, like she's not really stepping down. She is, but like, like this is what, I don't think we necessarily can see the, the goal here, whether it's a run for presidency

or whether it's like a joint contract with Fox News or whatever, you know, like there's something else. How about MS now? I mean, yes. Even MS now. Now, I mean,

I think that for for a national campaign, then the political moves that she's made over the past couple of months have been pretty savvy in terms of like any other sort of media platform. It's hard to imagine what sort of a national news program or a CNN type post would really, where that would really be necessary, you know, but maybe, but who knows? Who knows? Real America's voice might have an opening. You know, she has connections over there.

She does. She does indeed. I mean, listen, she could get on the air wherever she wants. She's not a doctrinaire, right? She's like, she goes against the grain on some of these big issues. And she's also, you know, got all the space laser content that you're that you could possibly want for those slow days. Oh, no, no, she's way beyond that now. She's grown as a person as a politician. Listen, I mean, I don't kind of believe any of it, but I'll reiterate what I said last time, which is just like she actually handled all of that stuff exactly right. I mean, just the only part, like, as far as for all the things that we've learned from Donald Trump about how most of the normal, you know, two-stepping that you do as a politician doesn't really matter in the end. I think what MTG has shown us, which I think is just undeniably true, it's just like, if someone asked you about the bad thing or the questionable thing that you've done, just be like, yeah, I did that. That sucks.

Like, I'm really, I'm really sorry for doing that. Hope I can be a better person moving forward. And it just sort of goes away. Yeah. We got a note from alert listener Mike Kaplan, who provides an example, David, of only in podcast journalism. Oh. It's a new category.

Emergency pod. What else is it? Well, the word Mike came up with was comfortability. Ooh. He writes, David has used this twice in recent episodes. Really? Comfortability? Like being the state of being comfortable?

Yeah, I guess. And he also says, and the pod father himself, Bill Simmons used it well. I apologize for the lack of specific citations, but I'm in the gymnastics's parents waiting area with stale air, a lack of personal space, an excessive amount of fluorescent light. So thank you, Mike. We forgive you. Comfortability is a noun that means a condition or degree of being comfortable. You're saying that no one actually said it outside of podcasts. I've never heard of myself. I don't believe I've ever said it. What I thought we should do, though, is open up a whole new...

I think it is true that we say a lot of things, that we have a lot of word choices in podcasts, that involve getting out over your skis and instead of like rewriting the yeah no that one actually is used a lot but like you you start down a sentence and then before you realize that like you wish you had started the sentence in a different way you just start looking for different forms of the words that are already coming out of your mouth you know just to sort of yes but i thought it david it's a whole new frontier of only in journalism yeah if you have some only in podcast journalism from the ringer or elsewhere write me bryne dot curtis at the ringer dot com there is, as I say, a lot to unpack here.

Yeah, I don't want to hear. I've already posted that on Bill Simmons Reddit. Like, okay, we've read that. So I, folks, that does not count. Send them in here too, all right. All right, David, in the notebook dump, a very special guest on the podcast today. It's Susan Orlean.

Susan Orlean first contributed to the New Yorker on May 25th, 1987. That was the date of the issue. She wrote a talk of the town story I went and looked this up because of course you can look page by page through old New Yorkers on the Yorker website Sure

Here's some notable things about the May 25th 1987 issue No bylines on Talk of the Town stories They were all anonymous Number two, awesomely 80s magazine ads For Stoufers Frozen Diners and Dean Whitter And number three John Updike

Also without a byline writing about Gary Hart. Wait, how do you know it was him if it was not with a bylaw? Well, they say it on the website. See, if you go to the story, it's on there, but in the actual New Yorker in those days, pre-internet, there was no byline on the story. But that's who they got to write their kickoff talk item

about Gary Hart. See if John Updike can do it. Maybe he's not busy. Susan Orlean and I talked about so many things from reporting to writing to adaptation to Tina Brown. Here's Susan Orlean. Susan, I'd love to start with your very first piece in The New Yorker, which was published in 1987. In those days, how did an up-and-coming writer get the New Yorker to notice them?

You would throw yourself at their feet and grovel. Practically, that was practically what you had to do. It was really tough. In 1987, the New Yorker, after it was in business at that point for 50s. years, it really didn't go outside its own family and friends to look for new writers. Rarely did they ever kind of actively open the doors or even put word out that they were looking. In this case, it was right when William Sean had been pushed out. Robert Gottlieb had come in, and I think there were a number of writers who left at that time out of loyalty to Sean. So there was a bit of a

need to bring in some new blood. Probably Gottlieb also wanted to bring people in who were his people. So the word had gone out in the journalism world of New York at that time that believe it or not, the New Yorker was kind of open to hearing from outsiders. I just lucked into hearing this and gathered my clips, ran down to the New Yorker offices, which were then in Midtown, and delivered my clips imagining somehow that they would say, oh, you're here, we've been waiting for you. Come in, join our staff. wasn't quite like that. But they did read the clips.

The next thing I knew, I got a call from the editor of the Talk of the Town section saying, why don't you come on in and let's talk. That results in your first talk of the town piece, which in those days did not have a byline. So what was it like to make your debut without a byline in the New York? You know, it's funny. I didn't care at all. It was, to me, such a thrill to see. see my writing in the New Yorker typeface that I literally wallpapered my office with the printouts of

the galleys. I was so elated. It was also true that since no one had a byline, I mean, in the talk section, it didn't matter. And the big thrill for me was discovering that the piece running next to mine in talk that week was written by John Updike. So I only knew this because when I was in the production room, I saw the piece paste it up and it still had his name just scribbled in pencil on it. But that was part of the kind of secret thrill was knowing who had written these. But it was also part of the magazine. philosophy at that time, which was to have a unified voice of the magazine doing that section for sure. But they also did not emphasize the cult of personality at all. The bylines on the 10,000

word long pieces, the big giant, you know, wopper of a piece, were at the end of the piece in small type and there was no index. So you would read this piece that would take you an hour and only at the very end did you know who wrote it. What idea did you sell the New Yorker on in that first encounter? I had noticed at that time there was a chain of stores. They were nationwide. Actually, they were global. The Italian sweater company Benetton. I had noticed that one of the first, features in every Benetton store was that the sweaters were folded very precisely and piled in these architectural little stacks. And if you went into the store and tried to pull a sweater off the stack, the salespeople would get very shook up. They were really clearly invested

in their beautiful architectural stacks of sweaters. I proposed doing a talk piece about the folders, the sweater folders of Benetton. Did Benetton train them? Did you go to a folding boot camp? How did they get, or did they find people who already had this talent for folding so beautifully? The story actually was pretty hilarious because these young people who worked at Benetton,

they did get trained, and then they got very invested in their folding and had a lot of pride in their folding and were a bit competitive with each other about their folding. So it was pretty funny. And it kind of fit the talk of the town ethos of being very observational, being the kind of wandering eye on mostly New York. You know, most of the stories were in New York and kind of turning the unexpected corner and exploring what was there. So it was very much in keeping with the spirit of the section. You write and Joyride that you felt like an interloper in those early years of the magazine

among the John Updikes and Calvin Trillens. When did you stop feeling like an interloper? Yeah, that's a good question. I think it lasted for a shockingly long period of time. I think that when you've got a publication with such a, it's such a monumental kind of presence and history, for a long, long time, you still feel like the kid at the grownups table.

And I did really, I wouldn't say I still feel it, but I don't think there was ever a moment where I thought, yeah, well, now I'm like deeply embedded in this institution. In fact, I used to occasionally go, you know, I had an office at the magazine for a very long time, and I used to go into the library. And one of the wonderful things about the library is that each writer who had written a substantial amount had a file of their clips. And so you would go into the, library and you would see the file of John McPhee and A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell.

And if you wanted to feel like the kid at the grown-ups table, that's all you had to do was to go into the library and feel that and feel like those were the real writers. And you were still kind of on probation. I would say there was a moment when I, I've seen. I've seen. still look up at those people as really being the founders of narrative nonfiction, the giants, and that I'm lucky to be at the same institution, but they still kind of loom large in my imagination. Talk to you by reporting for a second. You identify two kinds of magazine stories that you're very attracted to.

One is what you call the who knew story. What's a who knew story? That is the kind of story where through luck or coincidence, you stumble into a subculture, an interest, you know, a kind of defining, even a place that you didn't even knew exists. And there's this feeling of complete surprise and discovery. Who knew? Who knew that people were obsessed with taxidermy? Who knew that there was a gospel circuit in the Deep South that continued on a weekly basis? You know, it's that feeling of who knew that people competed in children's beauty pageants? There's just that feeling of, wow, I've just discovered a new land that I didn't even know. was on the map. So it contains that element of pure discovery.

Another type of Susan Orlean story is the hiding in plain sight story. What's an example of a hiding in plain sight? Well, those are the kinds of stories that where I've kind of wandered past something a million times in my life, probably assuming that I knew everything there was to know about it. And then for what reason, I stop and take a harder look and realize that I actually don't know anything about this, this thing that seems so familiar. And there's that shock of the familiar, the thing that seemed so commonplace. And yet, once you really examine it, it becomes very rich and complex. I think a perfect example of this is a piece I did about a 10-year-old boy in New Jersey, a very

regular kid living a pretty regular life. You would think what could you possibly say about a 10-year-old suburban kid in New Jersey, but if you stop and think about it, unless you're a 10-year-old boy, you don't actually know what is going on in the world of a 10-year-old boy. And for me, certainly, it was absolutely a hiding in plain sight kind of story where I had never thought about it and yet, wow, was it an incredible and exotic world to dive into? And it has that kind of wonderful tension of being the thing that you feel like you knew. So you have that additional surprise of thinking, yeah, but actually, I really don't know anything about this thing that felt so familiar. How do you approach somebody that's never talked to a journalist before?

That's a really great question, and it's a really important one. I write a lot about people who have never talk to a journalist. What's important, I think, is number one, in having a sincere interest in hearing their story. And I think people are very good at sensing whether you have an agenda, whether you have an attitude towards them. I, you know, I think they know if you're saying, I'm curious about your world. I want you to teach me about your world. And I don't come over-equipped with loads of book learning. I don't arrive saying, huh, well, I've read this definitive volume and this definitive, you know,

story and book and whatever about your world. Instead, I like to go in and say, I really don't know anything about your world. I'm asking you to teach me about it. People do like teaching people about their, what they know and what they feel comfortable with. I think if you show up and you're representing a fancy magazine in New York, You've got to take yourself down a couple of notches and say to someone, say people who run a beauty pageant in Tennessee, if you come in and say, you know, I've done all the reading and I've studied this sociological treatise on beauty pageants and you're not going to get anywhere. I think if you show up and say, hey, I don't know anything about this.

I'm really curious. How do you do this? How do you judge these beauty pageants? Where do the contestants come from? People can sense an authentic interest. And it's a rare case where someone will say, go away. I don't want to talk to you. It's all about building trust.

And you build trust by being trustworthy. There's a passage in your book that really spoke to me because I think all of us reporters are very conscious of our facial expressions when we're doing an interview, and you name something called reporter resting face? Right. Can you explain reporter resting face? Yeah, well, it's funny because this is something that you rely on often when, say,

I'm going to a gathering of the people that I'm writing about. And everybody has fundamentally the sort of terror of the people, like going to the junior high dance by yourself. I mean, this is, this is the nature of being a reporter is that you go through this trauma over and over again. And you need to kind of brace yourself because it is awkward. It is self-conscious making. But you've got to just, you've got to do it. And it's important to look approachable, but not overly eager. You need to look friendly but not kind of crazy animated. It's a sort of calm confidence that you need to sort of convey in your face that will make you approachable. And if you go up to people and say,

you know, I'm new here. When, you know, how late does this stay open or how often have you been here, you don't seem intrusive, but at the same time, you are, you want to open a door, you want them to keep talking. You don't want them to say, it closes at eight, end of conversation. So that calm, confident, but inviting sort of body language and expression on your face, you have to practice it because it doesn't necessarily come naturally when you walk into a room full of strangers where your first very human impulse is to turn and run. You tell you, this has become even weirder in the podcast era because you can often see your own face in the next Zoom window.

Oh, and believe me, it's totally weird and not necessarily a good thing. In fact, I spent several months being on a daily Zoom in a writer's room on a TV show, and I finally realized I had to turn off my camera. I could not look at myself because I spent so much time looking at like, boy, I parted my hair crookedly. I've got to fix the – it was so distracting. So interviewing people on Zoom, I mean, I don't do it very often. I usually when I'm reporting, I'm there physically in person.

It's a much more natural dynamic if you're not like also holding a mirror to your own face. So that's reporting. Let's talk about writing. When you write, you like to read your work aloud. What kind of quality do you think that gives you writing? I think it offers two very, very useful kind of results. One is self-editing. Reading allows you to have a certain kind of objective distance from your work. You hear it and you really hear it for what it is. If a sentence is boring, if language is awkward. If you're reading it on the same,

the page silently, your eyes will fool you. It'll fix things that you haven't actually fixed. Reading it out loud is you're really digging deep. You're really hearing it for what it is. And it allows you then to have a bit of that objective editorial insight to say, you know what, that doesn't sound right. That sounds awkward or that part's overwritten. It's a great self-editing tool and I've never found a better one. The other thing that it does that's very important to me is attune you to the sort of musical or oral A-U-R-A-L qualities of your work. And even though most people don't read out loud, I still think that readers respond subconsciously to the rhythm of a story. You know, we've all had that experience of saying this thing dragged or, boy, I just race through

this piece. I mean, we do feel it intuitively that some things are slow and some things are fast and some things really propel you even when you maybe didn't think you were going to be that interested in the story. The only way to fine-tune that quality in your writing is to hear it out loud. And then you are confronting very directly the sort of tonal quality of the writing. I believe strongly in that being an important part of what makes a successful piece. What keeps a reader reading. I mean, that's the great challenge. And readers keep reading if they feel like they're being carried along very, almost effortlessly,

that they just feel compelled to keep reading. And that's what you want. And it's very hard, or I should say reading out loud helps you see where that works and where it doesn't work and helps you fix it if it's not working. What form does your writer's block take? Knock on wood, I am not a person who suffers a lot from writer's block. But if I ever feel really stuck, I have two strong impulses. One is get up and walk away from the computer. Nobody ever got anywhere sitting and staring at a screen and becoming hysterical.

It just doesn't work. So I say get up, go away from your screen. And I usually feel like the best thing to do is do something physical. weed the garden, go for a run, go to the gym, cook a meal, do something, get out of your head, and let your unconscious work to resolve the problem of why you're having trouble writing. The second thing, which to me is unique to nonfiction, and I'm sure fiction writers have a very different approach. I often feel that I have writers block or I get stuck when I'm not quite sure what I'm trying to say. If I know what I'm saying, I'm pretty good at saying it. The writer's block

is not writing block, it's thinking block. It's that I don't know what I'm trying to say. And usually what that means is I should go back and do a little more reporting, that I should stop trying to squeeze out sentences that aren't really ready to be written and instead stop and think, what have I not figured out yet? Why is this a problem? Well, it's a problem because I need to do a little more homework before I write this. I'm happy to say that most of the time, a combination of these two things, like literally walking away and trying to let my unconscious do some work, plus doing more research about what I'm trying to say, it will resolve itself. And I know writer's book is real.

I'm not saying that it's an invention. Writing is hard. But I happen to think usually it's a failure of understanding what you're trying to say rather than I can't find the words. You mentioned Bob Gottlieb earlier. 1992, he's out as New Yorker editor, Tina Brown, is in. What were Tina's methods of motivating writers? terror. I love Tina, and she was a fantastic editor and a great influence on me, and I'm very grateful to

having worked with her. She kept people off balance. It was very much, you know, rather than the coach who tells you, you're great, she was sort of the coach that left you wondering, am I great or am I horrible? Am I going to be fired or am I the best? And I think that she never wanted anyone to be too comfortable, too complacent, feeling like, oh, you know, this is easy, I can do this in my sleep. There was always this sense of, I need to keep proving myself. And it drives you to achieve at a pretty high level.

It's not easy to live with. And some people couldn't tolerate it. And there were times when I felt like I just can't handle this much pressure. But I also did some of the best work that I'd ever done. And I think that it was that motivation of feeling like I want to show Tina that I'm really good. because the alternative is maybe I'll get fired. Before you go, I have three favorite Susan Orlean stories I'd love to ask you about since you are, in fact, Susan Orlean. Number one, life's swell about the surfer girls on Maui that you wrote for women outside in fall of 1998.

How did you meet the Maui Surfer Girls? Well, that was a near-miss kind of situation where I had been given a list of names of these young women in Maui who were all really into surfing. And this was the kind of early days of women surfing. It was not that common of a sport at that point. I went to Maui to profile them. And one of the girls that I called said, oh, I'm not into surfing anymore. And I called my editor, and I said, look, I'm really sorry, but the story fell apart. Like none of these girls are into surfing. she said just enjoy Maui for a day and you come home but have a day relax there was one girl left on the list who and I hadn't called her because it was so discouraged I thought all right as long as I have an extra day I'm just going to call her she was actually a body surfer so she wasn't really doing what I was interested in but I was feeling sorry for myself and I called her and I said hey look you know I came out here to try to write about these girls and I'm unbelievably bummed out and the story fell apart.

And she said, oh, man, you got the wrong girl. I'll introduce you to the girls who are the surfers. She rattled off, you know, six names of girls who were really hardcore, working with a coach, hoping to become professional, young, young girls, teenagers. And lo and behold, like each one was more passionate than the next about surfing. So it was absolutely a lucky turnabout. And as you know, that story became the basis of the movie Blue Crush. It really sort of elevated the world of women's surfing, which was a pretty marginal sport at that point. But it was pure luck, pure luck.

a story that threatened never to happen. All right, story number two, Devotion Road. You mentioned this. It's about a gospel group in Jackson, Mississippi, which ran in the New Yorker, April 17, 1995. What got you interested in following a gospel group around through these small towns in the South? I had very minimal exposure to gospel music, just hearing it now and again, and I loved it.

I just thought it was so magnificent, so beautiful. I went to a gospel show in Manhattan and just was blown away. It was several different groups all performing. They were all from the South. And I was chatting with a woman who was sitting near me. And she said, oh, my God, you know, this is, this goes on all the time down South. They have gospel performances every weekend. You know, that's a whole part of the South that you northerners don't know anything about.

I just thought I've got to write about this. This is extraordinary. And I wasn't quite sure how to approach it until I saw an obituary for a gospel singer who was such a huge figure in Jackson, Mississippi, that when he passed away, they shut down traffic in downtown Jackson, downtown Jackson for his funeral. I thought this is amazing. This just shows you how little I know about this world that this man was such a huge figure. But of course, I had never heard his name. So I got in touch with the members of his group who were continuing to perform. And I just had

this crazy idea that I wanted to travel the gospel circuit and see it for me. myself, to my delight and a little bit surprise, they agreed to let me go on the road with them, which I did for about two weeks. And it was really one of the great experiences of my life. I'll tweet out a link to the story, but this is, it's written in such an amazing way where you save the actual gospel performance till the very, very end of the story. So as you're reading it along, you're like, okay, this is what these men are like. This is what their buses like. These are what the hats that the women in the audience are wearing are like, but it keeps pushing off the performance. Then you finally get to it. It's almost cathartic in the way it is for the people in the crowd anyway.

And if you listen to gospel music, that's the way it feels. It's sort of a rising crescendo. There's a lot of kind of warming you up and warming you up and it gets more intense and more intense and then everybody starts singing and it's just glorious. It's really good. beautiful, amazing music and, you know, an amazing tradition. All right. Last one. Orchid fever, Trane and the New Yorker, same year, January 23rd, 1995, later to become the book The Orchid Thief.

I think we've either read it or seen the cinematic, you know, version of John LaRose. What did John LaRose think of this piece after you published in the magazine? That's a great question. You know, John LaRose is a very unapologetic narcissist. So one thing I knew was that no matter how nuanced a portrayal that might have been, he would love it because he enjoyed attention very much. He told me after the book came out that he called me and he said, you know, I read the book and I said, yeah.

And he said, you did a pretty good job. And I thought, all right, that's about as good as I can expect from him. All things being equal, he was for being such an ornery, crazy guy who like pulling your chain and making life miserable for everyone around him, he was an incredibly great subject. He never demanded that he have any right to see what I was writing. He never interfered. He gave me as much time as I could have possibly wanted. He was very unguarded with what he said and how he allowed himself to be observed. So, and I knew he would never say to me, boy, that book was great. I mean, it just was never going to happen. I consider it the highest compliment that I could have possibly gotten from him to say that he thought I did a pretty good job.

I rewatched adaptation this week for the first time since I saw it in the theater when it came out. I had forgotten how wonderfully bad shit that entire movie. It's a phenomenal movie. It is, it's a brilliant movie that probably will stand forever as the ultimate commentary on Hollywood, on creativity, on, you know, on writing. It really does it in a way that maybe, can never be topped. All right.

Last question, Susan. I learned so much from Joyride about your childhood in Shaker Heights, Ohio, about your parents, about your writing. I also learned that you were an extra in the movie,

The Deer Hunter. How in the world did that happen? I know. This is funny. And as I say, Merrill Streep and I have, our lives have run in parallel for many years.

Total accident. I was home for Thanksgiving vacation when I was in college. A friend called and he said, you know, I've got this job. I need to wrangle extras for this movie that's shooting in Cleveland. And I said, well, like, what's it called? And he said, it's called the deer hunter. And I thought, well, that sounds really stupid.

And I said, what is the director done? He said, well, he did this movie, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. And I thought that was a kid's movie. So I thought, oh, this whole thing is a waste of. time, but you know how it is. You're home for vacation. You don't have a bunch to do. So I said, sure, I'll do it. Why not? I think we got paid $20 or something. So it was a profitable undertaking no matter what. We show up and the scene being shot was the wedding, which turned into a very important scene in the movie, and we were guests at the wedding. And they shot the scene over and

over again. I didn't know any of the actors except for Robert De Niro, and I thought, you know, whoever these people are, this whole thing is ridiculous, but I'm doing my friend of favor. I'm going to be an extra. And I really expected nothing from the movie. Of course, it swept the Oscars. You know, Best Picture, Best Actor, Best This, Best That, launched the career of Christopher Rwandan and Meryl Streep and, you know, it was really a seminal movie. And I laugh when I think of how I had dismissed it so completely and thought, I'm doing them a favor by being an extra. All right, Susan Orleans new book is Joy Ride. Buy it immediately put it on your bookshelf next to other Susan Orlean volumes. Susan, thanks so much for coming on the press box.

This is my pleasure. I'm so happy to have had the time with you. All right, David, before we go, we should provide a lot. little Susan Orlean syllabus here for those interested in reading more. Oh, yeah. I mean, to give you three books. The new book, which is really, really good. Her memoir is called Joy Ride. I think my favorite Susan Orlean book is her collection.

The Bullfighter checks her makeup. Love it. Came out in 2001. And you know how every writer that does magazine collections, they kind of have one great collection and one superior collection? Well, it's just like, it's like a band of the first album. You have like 10 years to write the songs. like retool them in concerts and the second album you had to do like in like three months.

You know, it's that first one as like the entire New Yorker backlog is, you know, and then the second one, it's like, what have you done sense? You know, just yeah, it's really, really good. If you want the deep cut, it's this book called Saturday night, which was Susan Orleans first book. She had this idea and said, want to go around and see how different people spend Saturday night. Oh, yeah. So she went to a missile silo. She went to a place where there was poker dancing.

it's really interesting. It's always interesting to see a writer who is on her way to being great, but still in the process of being great. And that's to me what Saturday night is. Anyway, if you want to read more from Susan Orlean. In the meantime, it's time to visit with somebody who is already great. It's time for David Shoemaker guesses,

the strained pun headline. Yeah. David, last Monday's headline, about a duck pawn minus the foul, was no ducks given. So good. Today's headline comes to us from the New York Times book review where our old friend Gilbert Cruz is doing some fantastic work.

Yeah. It is about the aforementioned, John Updike. A new collection of Updike's letters are out. Updike's letters. All right now, there are going to be no rabbit puns, no update specific puns here. Just think generally as you ponder. what was the New York Times book reviews strained pun headline?

No rabbit puns. No, um, uh, dude, where am I supposed to start here? By John? Uh, no. Let me give you a hand here. Imagine old personal ads. How did old personal ads start like in the newspaper? To whom it may concern or no, no, no, uh, um, you would identify yourself?

Uh, and you would say IMA. Maybe there'd be three letters that would have done. SWM. Uh-huh. So that is, what does that mean? Single white nail? Yeah, okay, there we go. But we're actually sending these letters.

Oh, M-A-I-L? Yeah, so it's actually straight white male. Straight white male, yeah. Straight white males. Oh, that's really good. Yeah, good job, Gilbert and gang over there at the New York Times Book Review. He's David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis.

But he's a magic. By Bruce Baldwin. Before we go, David, we need to get people ready for some very, very special podcast. Oh, yeah. Coming here at the press box. We've been busy despite all the Thanksgiving and early Christmas and Yolo Boko Flood cheer in the air.

Yep. Coming on Wednesday, David, to this very podcast, Bob Costas is going to be here. You'll remember the last time Bob Costas was around, we recalled the glory days of the NBA on NBC.

Well, I wrote to Bob and said, I think there's a great podcast. in another corner of sports television history. And that corner is the great NFL pregame wars of the 1980s and 90s. On NBC, you had Bob Costas. Oh, yeah, I remember. On CBS, you had Brent Musburger.

Yep. With Costas on NBC, you had OJ Simpson. Mm-hmm. You had Ahmad Rashad on the pregame show proposing to Felicia Rashad Felicia Ayers Allen then Star of the Cosby Show

that happened on the NFL pregame show and by the way Felicia was covering the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade for NBC Oh my God and they had to get a camera

there so that she could respond to Ahmad's proposal Wait he wasn't in person He was at the Pontiac Silverdome which is not necessarily the most romantic place No That's kind of odd, right?

Throw a proposal of it. Anyway, there's so many great stories from those days. Another one, the Skins game golf tournament is coming back this weekend to Amazon. And one time in the 80s, NBC had the Skins game, and they were showing it tape delayed after football. Well, Brent Musburger over on CBS just got on the air and just gave away the results of the skins game. You wouldn't need a wait to watch. Some real Eric Bischoff stuff. It was real Eric Bischoff, Tony Giovanni stuff, man.

It was amazing. That's coming Wednesday on the press. box. And then Monday, David, a brand new type of press box episode. We are calling this the December issue to be followed by special podcasts next year, the January issue, the February issue, and so forth. Let's not get too far ahead of herself. Once again, I'm getting over my skis, as they like to say. On the December issue, we are going to take a look at one topic and have a big,

sprawling fun conversation about it and then bring on a special guest to talk about that topic. Our topic Monday is The New Yorker magazine. New Yorker turned 100 years old this year. There's a brand new Netflix doc coming out after Thanksgiving

that David and I have seen about the New Yorker that embeds with the staff, the cartoon editor, the staff writers. So that's the first part of the December issue. And then for the second part, I interviewed New Yorker editor David Rembrandt. about the past, present, and future of the magazine. But wait, there's more.

Because this podcast is called the December issue, I hired the art genius of the ringer. Let me look at the business card here. David Shoemaker to design a magazine cover for the issue. Yes, right, a magazine cover for the issue. If you log on to our new Instagram account at Pressbox Ringer this weekend, you will see David, that is Shoemaker, not Remnix, cover for the December issue.

I'm so excited about this. I had so much fun recording this conversation with you. So much fun talking to Remnick, this is going to be a great series to take us into 2026. So first thing Monday morning, the December issue, Brian and David and David, this Wednesday, before Thanksgiving, if you're traveling, we'll have it up early Eastern time by. Bob Costas on the great NFL pregame wars. David, happy Thanksgiving. Can't wait to tee it up with you for more lukewarm takes about the media.

See you then, David. See you later, Brian.